In 2011, Southampton Solent University, a post-1992 university in southern England, introduced a new marking scheme with the aims of changing marking practice to achieve greater transparency and consistency in marking, and to ensure that the full range of marks was being awarded to students. This paper discusses the strategic background to the…

The ultimate communicative purpose of literature reviews is to convince the reader of the worthiness of the writer's research, which is realized stage by stage and evaluation plays an important role in achieving this end. However, concerns about evaluation demonstration in novice academic writers' literature reviews have been repeatedly voiced in…

Survey results from a national sample of economics instructors describe the grading policies and practices in principles of economics courses. The survey results provide insights about absolute and relative grading systems used by instructors, the course components and their weights that determine grades, and the type of assessment items used for…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of assessment method (essays vs. examinations) and instruction method (seminars vs. lectures) on student perceptions of the fairness of the assessment process. Department-specific combinations of these factors give a unique profile to the assessment process and to the way students interact with…

We demonstrate how the re-marker and reporter facility of the DEWIS e-Assessment system facilitates the capture, analysis and reporting of student errors using two case studies: logarithms and indices for first-year computing students at the University of the West of England, and Sturm-Liouville problems for second-year mathematics students at…

Twenty-eight studies of grades, over a century, were reviewed using the argument-based approach to validity suggested by Kane as a theoretical framework. The review draws conclusions about the meaning of graded achievement, its relation to tested achievement, and changes in the construct of graded achievement over time. "Graded…

The design, delivery and assessment of a complete educational scheme, such as a degree programme or a professional qualification course, is a complex matter. Maintaining alignment between the stated aims of the curriculum and the scoring of student achievement is an overarching concern. The potential for drift across individual aspects of an…

Background/Context: Despite problems with accountability systems under No Child Left Behind, the policy has been widely commended for exposing the depth and breadth of educational inequality in the United States. As states implement new accountability systems, there is growing concern that attention to achievement gaps and the performance of…

Background/Context: From two decades of research on the grading practices of teachers in secondary schools, researchers discovered that teachers evaluated students on numerous factors that do not validly assess a student's achievement level in a specific content area. These consistent findings suggested that traditional grading practices evolved…

This paper uses a blind grading process to test if the performance of online students were different from traditional students using a term paper from an economics graduate course. Consistent with the literature, no significant difference was found between the scores of online students and those of traditional students. Also consistent with the…

Raimes (1983) has identified nine components necessary to produce a piece of writing that is clear, fluent and effective. These are also the aspects that are considered when assessing writing. The common practice is to have raters score the essays and they are provided with a rating scale for this purpose. A training and practice session is also…

To obtain information on current high school grading policies, additional questions were included on the College Board's High School Profile in 1997. Results of the survey provide insight into the following grading policies across high schools: a large majority of schools (91 percent) use the traditional grading system A-F, or numeric grades; 92.2…

Use of choice-weighted scores as a basis for assigning grades in college courses was investigated. Reliability and validity indices offer little to recommend either type of choice-weighted scoring over number-right scoring. The potential for choice-weighted scoring to enhance the teaching/testing process is discussed. (Author/GK)

This paper presents a scientific rationale for deciding the number of points to use on a grading scale in any given assessment situation. The rationale is applied to two common methods of assessment (multiple-choice and essay tests) and an example of a composite assessment. (Author/SJL)

Supposing different values of the standard measurement error, the relation of scale coarseness to the total amount of error is studied on the basis of probability distribution of error. The analyses are performed within two models of error and with two criteria of amount of error. (Editor/SJL)